Philosophical Arabesques

Nikolai Bukharin

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781685900946
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bukharin’s Philosophical Arabesques was written while he was imprisoned in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, facing trial on charges of treason, and later awaiting execution after he was found guilty. After the death of Lenin, Bukharin cooperated with Stalin for a time. Once Stalin's supremacy was assured he began eliminating all potential rivals. For Bukharin, the process was to end with his confession before the Soviet court, facing the threat that his young family would be killed along with him if he did not.
While awaiting his death, Bukharin wrote prolifically. He considered Philosophical Arabesques as the most important of his prison writings. In its pages, he covers the full range of issues in Marxist philosophy—the sources of knowledge, the nature of truth, freedom and necessity, the relationship of Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. The project constitutes a defense of the genuine legacy of Lenin's Marxism against the use of his memory to legitimate totalitarian power.
Consigned to the Kremlin archives for a half-century after Bukharin’s execution, this work is now being published for the first time in English. It will be an essential reference work for scholars of Marxism and the Russian revolution and a landmark in the history of prison writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: A Voice from the Dead by Helena Sheehan
• Editorial Note by Monthly Review Press
• Author’s Foreword
• Author’s Introduction
• 1 — The Reality of the World and the Intrigues of Solipsism
• 2 — Acceptance and Nonacceptance of the World
• 3 — Things in Themselves and Their Cognizability
• 4 — Space and Time
• 5 — Mediated Knowledge
• 6 — The Abstract and the Concrete
• 7 — Perception, Image, Concept
• 8 — Living Nature and the Artistic Attitude toward It
• 9 — Rational Thought, Dialectical Thought, and Direct Contemplation
• 10 — Practice in General and the Place of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge
• 11 — Practical, Theoretical and Aesthetic Attitudes toward the World, and Their Unity
• 12 — The Fundamental Positions of Materialism and Idealism
• 13 — Hylozoism and Panpsychism
• 14 — Hindu Mysticism and Western European Philosophy
• 15 — The So-called Philosophy of Identity
• 16 — The Sins of Mechanistic Materialism
• 17 — The General Laws and Relations of Being
• 18 — Teleology
• 19 — Freedom and Necessity
• 20 — The Organism
• 21 — Modern Science and Dialectical Materialism
• 22 — The Sociology of Thought: Labor and Thought as Social-Historical Categories
• 23 — The Sociology of Thought: Mode of Production and Mode of Representation
• 24 — On So-called Racial Thought
• 25 — Social Position, Thought, and “Experience”
• 26 — The Object of Philosophy
• 27 — The Subject of Philosophy
• 28 — The Interaction of Subject and Object
• 29 — Society as the Object and Subject of Mastering
• 30 — Truth: The Concept of Truth and the Criterion of the Truthful
• 31 — Truth: Absolute and Relative Truth
• 32 — The Good
• 33 — Hegel’s Dialectical Idealism as a System
• 34 — The Dialectics of Hegel and the Dialectics of Marx
• 35 — Dialectics as Science and Dialectics as Art
• 36 — Science and Philosophy
• 37 — Evolution
• 38 — Theory and History
• 39 — The Social Ideal
• 40 — Lenin as a Philosopher
• Notes
• Index